Legal Studies Research Guide: Criminal Justice

Federally funded resource offering justice and drug-related information to support research, policy, and program development worldwide.

Information divided into 6 sections which cover: Characteristics of the criminal justice systems, Public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice-related topics, Nature and distribution of known offenses, Characteristics and distribution of persons arrested, Judicial processing of defendants, and Persons under correctional supervision.

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States.

U.S. law requires the Secretary of State to provide Congress, by April 30 of each year, a full and complete report on terrorism with regard to those countries and groups meeting criteria set forth in the legislation. This annual report is entitled Country Reports on Terrorism. Beginning with the report for 2004, it replaced the previously published Patterns of Global Terrorism.